COLLEGE STATION, Texas — Texas A&M health trains hundreds of students during the 14th annual disaster in college station. Giving students a real-world look at a mass casualty response.
There are 750 Texas A&M students participating in disaster day, right now we’re in the triage center where they’re actively responding to students' injuries.
Texas A&M student Justin Dugie was previously an officer in the army before attending A&M's medical school.
”I had a lot of prior experience of coordinating and resourcing people and putting them where they need to go," said Justin Dugie, Texas A&M med students and incident commander. "A lot of times it felt like a crisis manager,”
The disaster simulated a wildfire and Dugie’s main responsibility was to coordinate the medical response.
“You can see people are working together and communicating with each other," added Dugie. "It’s not just nurses talking to nurses, you have the nurse talking with the pharmacist, who’s talking with the doctor, who’s talking with the psychiatrist."
All students from the school of nursing, pharmacy, and corps cadets just to name a few utilized the element of surprise to train students.
“You never know when it’s going to hit and you never know how it’s going to hit, so the surprise really helps because it simulates that feeling as best as you can,” explained Dugie.
” Hands-on experiential learning sticks with students more so than book learning or classroom learning and today's the day they get to put those skills to practice,” said Gerard Carrino, department head and instructional professor for Texas A&M health science.
Each year Texas A&M health simulates a new disaster laid across the 60 acres offered at the training facility.
“Our students are very fortunate to have TEEX disaster city here so that they can practice in a real-world location that simulates a disaster extremely well,” said Carrino.